♀Dorothy Pray

Dorothy Pray was a woman of Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who married the English-born settler Richard Thayer there in 1651 and bore their children in the town in the 1650s. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Nathaniel Thayer (1658–1728).

Life

She is said to have been a daughter of Quinton Pray, an ironworker of Braintree. On 24 December 1651, at Braintree, Richard Thayer married Dorothy Pray; the marriage was performed by Mr. Thomas Flynt of Concord. The town clerk recorded three children born to them at Braintree between 1653 and 1658: Dorothy, Richard and Nathaniel. She was probably the Dorathy Thayer who died at Braintree on 11 December 1705, a week after a Richard Thayer.

Lines of descent

Nathaniel was most likely the Nathaniel Thayer who married Hannah Hayden at Braintree in 1679. Their son Hezekiah Thayer was the father of Noah Thayer (born 1745), and Noah’s daughter was Mary Thayer (1770–1827). Two of Mary’s grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other, so their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Dorothy Pray through both parents.

Notes

Her parents

Her father’s name comes from a Braintree Thayer genealogy. A dictionary of New England marriages lists Quinton Pray (1595–1667) and his wife Joan, of Lynn and Braintree, as married before about 1630. The Braintree town records enter the death of “Quinton Pray” on the 17th of the 4th month (June) 1667. Compiled works give her birth as 1630 or 1631.

The marriage and the children

The town clerk dated the marriage “(24) (10) 1651”, the tenth month being December, since the year then began in March. The dictionary of New England marriages prints 3 December 1651, most likely a digit lost from 24. A history of Bridgewater published in 1840 adds a son Cornelius, born in 1670.

Her death

The Braintree town records enter “Richard Thayer dyed ye fourth day of December 1705” and “Dorathy Thayer dyed ye 11th. day of December 1705”. The dictionary of New England marriages, the 1840 history of Bridgewater and a lineage book of the Daughters of the American Colonists all give 1705 as the year she and her husband died. A Braintree Thayer genealogy, however, dates her husband’s death 27 August 1695, from a gravestone, and Braintree had more than one Richard Thayer by 1705, so the register entries are not certainly theirs.